Book review: VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive

Many of you probably already heard about the book written by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman on the ins and outs of HA and DRS. In December I received my copy and I finally finished it and must say I’m quite impressed by what these guys have written. The book has a nice clean layout and simple but very clear diagrams. Also the language used is deep tech, but easy to read.

Although I’m certainly not new to HA & DRS, I was able to learn quite some things from the book. Like the calculation for HA “Percentage of cluster resources reserved”, did you know it doesn’t use slots like the “Host failure tolerate” setting? And did you know about the “ClusterStableTime” in DPM calculations? I didn’t, but the book does.

Eric Sloof:Last week I already received a proof copy of the new book by Duncan and Frank and I must say that I’m impressed. When you think – you know everything there is to know about HA and DRS, you should definitely read it. You will be amazed with the amount of detailed information about vSphere 4.1 DRS and HA clustering. Two other great takeaways are the “clear timelines” and “best practices”.

Marc G. Sevigny: The level of detail exceeds that available in any VMware-provided documentation. It is concise, very readable and informative. You can find implementation details that only an insider can know. The cost of one second of downtime that could have been prevented will exceed the cost of this useful guide!

Alan Renouf:All technical books should be like this, I love the depth of detail in this book, often technical books just explain the basics but this one gives you the full blown workings of both HA and DRS, this is key to any VMware admins life as they need to know what these features do and when they do them.